Chapter 2
We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are intermediatists--that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal: that all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness.
So then:
That our whole quasi-existence is an intermediate stage between positiveness and negativeness or realness and unrealness.
Like purgatory, I think.
But in our summing up, which was very sketchily done, we omitted to make clear that Realness is an aspect of the positive state.
By Realness, I mean that which does not merge away into something else, and that which is not partly something else: that which is not a reaction to, or an imitation of, something else. By a real hero, we mean one who is not partly a coward, or whose actions and motives do not merge away into cowardice. But, if in Continuity, all things do merge, by Realness, I mean the Universal, besides which there is nothing with which to merge.
That, though the local might be universalized, it is not conceivable that the universal can be localized: but that high approximations there may be, and that these approximate successes may be translated out of Intermediateness into Realness--quite as, in a relative sense, the industrial world recruits itself by translating out of unrealness, or out of the seemingly less real imaginings of inventors, machines which seem, when set up in factories, to have more of Realness than they had when only imagined.
That all progress, if all progress is toward stability, organization, harmony, consistency, or positiveness, is the attempt to become real.
So, then, in general metaphysical terms, our expression is that, like a purgatory, all that is commonly called "existence," which we call Intermediateness, is quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal, but expression of attempt to become real, or to generate for or recruit a real existence.
Our acceptance is that Science, though usually thought of so specifically, or in its own local terms, usually supposed to be a prying into old bones, bugs, unsavory messes, is an expression of this one spirit animating all Intermediateness: that, if Science could absolutely exclude all data but its own present data, or that which is assimilable with the present quasi-organization, it would be a real system, with positively definite outlines--it would be real.
Its seeming approximation to consistency, stability, system--positiveness or realness--is sustained by damning the irreconcilable or the unassimilable--
All would be well.
All would be heavenly--
If the damned would only stay damned.
2
In the autumn of 1883, and for years afterward, occurred brilliant-colored sunsets, such as had never been seen before within the memory of all observers. Also there were blue moons.
I think that one is likely to smile incredulously at the notion of blue moons. Nevertheless they were as common as were green suns in 1883.
Science had to account for these unconventionalities. Such publications as _Nature_ and _Knowledge_ were besieged with inquiries.
I suppose, in Alaska and in the South Sea Islands, all the medicine men were similarly upon trial.
Something had to be thought of.
Upon the 28th of August, 1883, the volcano of Krakatoa, of the Straits of Sunda, had blown up.
Terrific.
We're told that the sound was heard 2,000 miles, and that 36,380 persons were killed. Seems just a little unscientific, or impositive, to me: marvel to me we're not told 2,163 miles and 36,387 persons. The volume of smoke that went up must have been visible to other planets--or, tormented with our crawlings and scurryings, the earth complained to Mars; swore a vast black oath at us.
In all text-books that mention this occurrence--no exception so far so I have read--it is said that the extraordinary atmospheric effects of 1883 were first noticed in the last of August or the first of September.
That makes a difficulty for us.
It is said that these phenomena were caused by particles of volcanic dust that were cast high in the air by Krakatoa.
This is the explanation that was agreed upon in 1883--
But for seven years the atmospheric phenomena continued--
Except that, in the seven, there was a lapse of several years--and where was the volcanic dust all that time?
You'd think that such a question as that would make trouble?
Then you haven't studied hypnosis. You have never tried to demonstrate to a hypnotic that a table is not a hippopotamus. According to our general acceptance, it would be impossible to demonstrate such a thing. Point out a hundred reasons for saying that a hippopotamus is not a table: you'll have to end up agreeing that neither is a table a table--it only seems to be a table. Well, that's what the hippopotamus seems to be. So how can you prove that something is not something else, when neither is something else some other thing? There's nothing to prove.
This is one of the profundities that we advertised in advance.
You can oppose an absurdity only with some other absurdity. But Science is established preposterousness. We divide all intellection: the obviously preposterousness and the established.
But Krakatoa: that's the explanation that the scientists gave. I don't know what whopper the medicine men told.
We see, from the start, the very strong inclination of science to deny, as much as it can, external relations of this earth.
This book is an assemblage of data of external relations of this earth. We take the position that our data have been damned, upon no consideration for individual merits or demerits, but in conformity with a general attempt to hold out for isolation of this earth. This is attempted positiveness. We take the position that science can no more succeed than, in a similar endeavor, could the Chinese, or than could the United States. So then, with only pseudo-consideration of the phenomena of 1883, or as an expression of positivism in its aspect of isolation, or unrelatedness, scientists have perpetrated such an enormity as suspension of volcanic dust seven years in the air--disregarding the lapse of several years--rather than to admit the arrival of dust from somewhere beyond this earth. Not that scientists themselves have ever achieved positiveness, in its aspect of unitedness, among themselves--because Nordenskiold, before 1883, wrote a great deal upon his theory of cosmic dust, and Prof. Cleveland Abbe contended against the Krakatoan explanation--but that this is the orthodoxy of the main body of scientists.
My own chief reason for indignation here:
That this preposterous explanation interferes with some of my own enormities.
It would cost me too much explaining, if I should have to admit that this earth's atmosphere has such sustaining power.
Later, we shall have data of things that have gone up in the air and that have stayed up--somewhere--weeks--months--but not by the sustaining power of this earth's atmosphere. For instance, the turtle of Vicksburg. It seems to me that it would be ridiculous to think of a good-sized turtle hanging, for three or four months, upheld only by the air, over the town of Vicksburg. When it comes to the horse and the barn--I think that they'll be classics some day, but I can never accept that a horse and a barn could float several months in this earth's atmosphere.
The orthodox explanation:
See the _Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society_. It comes out absolutely for the orthodox explanation--absolutely and beautifully, also expensively. There are 492 pages in the "Report," and 40 plates, some of them marvelously colored. It was issued after an investigation that took five years. You couldn't think of anything done more efficiently, artistically, authoritatively. The mathematical parts are especially impressive: distribution of the dust of Krakatoa; velocity of translation and rates of subsidence; altitudes and persistences--
_Annual Register_, 1883-105:
That the atmospheric effects that have been attributed to Krakatoa were seen in Trinidad before the eruption occurred:
_Knowledge_, 5-418:
That they were seen in Natal, South Africa, six months before the eruption.
* * * * *
Inertia and its inhospitality.
Or raw meat should not be fed to babies.
We shall have a few data initiatorily.
I fear me that the horse and the barn were a little extreme for our budding liberalities.
The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.
Hailstones, for instance. One reads in the newspapers of hailstones the size of hens' eggs. One smiles. Nevertheless I will engage to list one hundred instances, from the _Monthly Weather Review_, of hailstones the size of hens' eggs. There is an account in _Nature_, Nov. 1, 1894, of hailstones that weighed almost two pounds each. See Chambers' Encyclopedia for three-pounders. _Report of the Smithsonian Institution_, 1870-479--two-pounders authenticated, and six-pounders reported. At Seringapatam, India, about the year 1800, fell a hailstone--
I fear me, I fear me: this is one of the profoundly damned. I blurt out something that should, perhaps, be withheld for several hundred pages--but that damned thing was the size of an elephant.
We laugh.
Or snowflakes. Size of saucers. Said to have fallen at Nashville, Tenn., Jan. 24, 1891. One smiles.
"In Montana, in the winter of 1887, fell snowflakes 15 inches across, and 8 inches thick." (_Monthly Weather Review_, 1915-73.)
In the topography of intellection, I should say that what we call knowledge is ignorance surrounded by laughter.
* * * * *
Black rains--red rains--the fall of a thousand tons of butter.
Jet-black snow--pink snow--blue hailstones--hailstones flavored like oranges.
Punk and silk and charcoal.
* * * * *
About one hundred years ago, if anyone was so credulous as to think that stones had ever fallen from the sky, he was reasoned with:
In the first place there are no stones in the sky:
Therefore no stones can fall from the sky.
Or nothing more reasonable or scientific or logical than that could be said upon any subject. The only trouble is the universal trouble: that the major premise is not real, or is intermediate somewhere between realness and unrealness.
In 1772, a committee, of whom Lavoisier was a member, was appointed by the French Academy, to investigate a report that a stone had fallen from the sky at Luce, France. Of all attempts at positiveness, in its aspect of isolation, I don't know of anything that has been fought harder for than the notion of this earth's unrelatedness. Lavoisier analyzed the stone of Luce. The exclusionists' explanation at that time was that stones do not fall from the sky: that luminous objects may seem to fall, and that hot stones may be picked up where a luminous object seemingly had landed--only lightning striking a stone, heating, even melting it.
The stone of Luce showed signs of fusion.
Lavoisier's analysis "absolutely proved" that this stone had not fallen: that it had been struck by lightning.
So, authoritatively, falling stones were damned. The stock means of exclusion remained the explanation of lightning that was seen to strike something--that had been upon the ground in the first place.
But positiveness and the fate of every positive statement. It is not customary to think of damned stones raising an outcry against a sentence of exclusion, but, subjectively, aerolites did--or data of them bombarded the walls raised against them--
_Monthly Review_, 1796-426
"The phenomenon which is the subject of the remarks before us will seem to most persons as little worthy of credit as any that could be offered. The falling of large stones from the sky, without any assignable cause of their previous ascent, seems to partake so much of the marvelous as almost entirely to exclude the operation of known and natural agents. Yet a body of evidence is here brought to prove that such events have actually taken place, and we ought not to withhold from it a proper degree of attention."
The writer abandons the first, or absolute, exclusion, and modifies it with the explanation that the day before a reported fall of stones in Tuscany, June 16, 1794, there had been an eruption of Vesuvius--
Or that stones do fall from the sky, but that they are stones that have been raised to the sky from some other part of the earth's surface by whirlwinds or by volcanic action.
It's more than one hundred and twenty years later. I know of no aerolite that has ever been acceptably traced to terrestrial origin.
Falling stones had to be undamned--though still with a reservation that held out for exclusion of outside forces.
One may have the knowledge of a Lavoisier, and still not be able to analyze, not be able even to see, except conformably with the hypnoses, or the conventional reactions against hypnoses, of one's era.
We believe no more.
We accept.
Little by little the whirlwind and volcano explanations had to be abandoned, but so powerful was this exclusion-hypnosis, sentence of damnation, or this attempt at positiveness, that far into our own times some scientists, notably Prof. Lawrence Smith and Sir Robert Ball, continued to hold out against all external origins, asserting that nothing could fall to this earth, unless it had been cast up or whirled up from some other part of this earth's surface.
It's as commendable as anything ever has been--by which I mean it's intermediate to the commendable and the censurable.
It's virginal.
Meteorites, data of which were once of the damned, have been admitted, but the common impression of them is only a retreat of attempted exclusion: that only two kinds of substance fall from the sky: metallic and stony: that the metallic objects are of iron and nickel--
Butter and paper and wool and silk and resin.
We see, to start with, that the virgins of science have fought and wept and screamed against external relations--upon two grounds:
There in the first place;
Or up from one part of this earth's surface and down to another.
As late as November, 1902, in _Nature Notes_, 13-231, a member of the Selborne Society still argued that meteorites do not fall from the sky; that they are masses of iron upon the ground "in the first place," that attract lightning; that the lightning is seen, and is mistaken for a falling, luminous object--
By progress we mean rape.
Butter and beef and blood and a stone with strange inscriptions upon it.
3
So then, it is our expression that Science relates to real knowledge no more than does the growth of a plant, or the organization of a department store, or the development of a nation: that all are assimilative, or organizing, or systematizing processes that represent different attempts to attain the positive state--the state commonly called heaven, I suppose I mean.
There can be no real science where there are indeterminate variables, but every variable is, in finer terms, indeterminate, or irregular, if only to have the appearance of being in Intermediateness is to express regularity unattained. The invariable, or the real and stable, would be nothing at all in Intermediateness--rather as, but in relative terms, an undistorted interpretation of external sounds in the mind of a dreamer could not continue to exist in a dreaming mind, because that touch of relative realness would be of awakening and not of dreaming. Science is the attempt to awaken to realness, wherein it is attempt to find regularity and uniformity. Or the regular and uniform would be that which has nothing external to disturb it. By the universal we mean the real. Or the notion is that the underlying super-attempt, as expressed in Science, is indifferent to the subject-matter of Science: that the attempt to regularize is the vital spirit. Bugs and stars and chemical messes: that they are only quasi-real, and that of them there is nothing real to know; but that systematization of pseudo-data is approximation to realness or final awakening--
Or a dreaming mind--and its centaurs and canary birds that turn into giraffes--there could be no real biology upon such subjects, but attempt, in a dreaming mind, to systematize such appearances would be movement toward awakening--if better mental co-ordination is all that we mean by the state of being awake--relatively awake.
So it is, that having attempted to systematize, by ignoring externality to the greatest possible degree, the notion of things dropping in upon this earth, from externality, is as unsettling and as unwelcome to Science as--tin horns blowing in upon a musician's relatively symmetric composition--flies alighting upon a painter's attempted harmony, and tracking colors one into another--suffragist getting up and making a political speech at a prayer meeting.
If all things are of a oneness, which is a state intermediate to unrealness and realness, and if nothing has succeeded in breaking away and establishing entity for itself, and could not continue to "exist" in intermediateness, if it should succeed, any more than could the born still at the same time be the uterine, I of course know of no positive difference between Science and Christian Science--and the attitude of both toward the unwelcome is the same--"it does not exist."
A Lord Kelvin and a Mrs. Eddy, and something not to their liking--it does not exist.
Of course not, we Intermediates say: but, also, that, in Intermediateness, neither is there absolute non-existence.
Or a Christian Scientist and a toothache--neither exists in the final sense: also neither is absolutely non-existent, and, according to our therapeutics, the one that more highly approximates to realness will win.
A secret of power--
I think it's another profundity.
Do you want power over something?
Be more nearly real than it.
We'll begin with yellow substances that have fallen upon this earth: we'll see whether our data of them have a higher approximation to realness than have the dogmas of those who deny their existence--that is, as products from somewhere external to this earth.
In mere impressionism we take our stand. We have no positive tests nor standards. Realism in art: realism in science--they pass away. In 1859, the thing to do was to accept Darwinism; now many biologists are revolting and trying to conceive of something else. The thing to do was to accept it in its day, but Darwinism of course was never proved:
The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest?
Not the strongest; not the cleverest--
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive.
"Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival."
Darwinism:
That survivors survive.
Although Darwinism, then, seems positively baseless, or absolutely irrational, its massing of supposed data, and its attempted coherence approximate more highly to Organization and Consistency than did the inchoate speculations that preceded it.
Or that Columbus never proved that the earth is round.
Shadow of the earth on the moon?
No one has ever seen it in its entirety. The earth's shadow is much larger than the moon. If the periphery of the shadow is curved--but the convex moon--a straight-edged object will cast a curved shadow upon a surface that is convex.
All the other so-called proofs may be taken up in the same way. It was impossible for Columbus to prove that the earth is round. It was not required: only that with a higher seeming of positiveness than that of his opponents, he should attempt. The thing to do, in 1492, was nevertheless to accept that beyond Europe, to the west, were other lands.
I offer for acceptance, as something concordant with the spirit of this first quarter of the 20th century, the expression that beyond this earth are--other lands--from which come things as, from America, float things to Europe.
As to yellow substances that have fallen upon this earth, the endeavor to exclude extra-mundane origins is the dogma that all yellow rains and yellow snows are colored with pollen from this earth's pine trees. _Symons' Meteorological Magazine_ is especially prudish in this respect and regards as highly improper all advances made by other explainers.
Nevertheless, the _Monthly Weather Review_, May, 1877, reports a golden-yellow fall, of Feb. 27, 1877, at Peckloh, Germany, in which four kinds of organisms, not pollen, were the coloring matter. There were minute things shaped like arrows, coffee beans, horns, and disks.
They may have been symbols. They may have been objective hieroglyphics--
Mere passing fancy--let it go--
In the _Annales de Chimie_, 85-288, there is a list of rains said to have contained sulphur. I have thirty or forty other notes. I'll not use one of them. I'll admit that every one of them is upon a fall of pollen. I said, to begin with, that our methods would be the methods of theologians and scientists, and they always begin with an appearance of liberality. I grant thirty or forty points to start with. I'm as liberal as any of them--or that my liberality won't cost me anything--the enormousness of the data that we shall have.
Or just to look over a typical instance of this dogma, and the way it works out:
In the _American Journal of Science_, 1-42-196, we are told of a yellow substance that fell by the bucketful upon a vessel, one "windless" night in June, in Pictou Harbor, Nova Scotia. The writer analyzed the substance, and it was found to "give off nitrogen and ammonia and an animal odor."
Now, one of our Intermediatist principles, to start with, is that so far from positive, in the aspect of Homogeneousness, are all substances, that, at least in what is called an elementary sense, anything can be found anywhere. Mahogany logs on the coast of Greenland; bugs of a valley on the top of Mt. Blanc; atheists at a prayer meeting; ice in India. For instance, chemical analysis can reveal that almost any dead man was poisoned with arsenic, we'll say, because there is no stomach without some iron, lead, tin, gold, arsenic in it and of it--which, of course, in a broader sense, doesn't matter much, because a certain number of persons must, as a restraining influence, be executed for murder every year; and, if detectives aren't able really to detect anything, illusion of their success is all that is necessary, and it is very honorable to give up one's life for society as a whole.
The chemist who analyzed the substance of Pictou sent a sample to the Editor of the _Journal_. The Editor of course found pollen in it.
My own acceptance is that there'd have to be some pollen in it: that nothing could very well fall through the air, in June, near the pine forests of Nova Scotia, and escape all floating spores of pollen. But the Editor does not say that this substance "contained" pollen. He disregards "nitrogen, ammonia, and an animal odor," and says that the substance was pollen. For the sake of our thirty or forty tokens of liberality, or pseudo-liberality, if we can't be really liberal, we grant that the chemist of the first examination probably wouldn't know an animal odor if he were janitor of a menagerie. As we go along, however, there can be no such sweeping ignoring of this phenomenon:
The fall of animal-matter from the sky.
I'd suggest, to start with, that we'd put ourselves in the place of deep-sea fishes:
How would they account for the fall of animal-matter from above?
They wouldn't try--
Or it's easy enough to think of most of us as deep-sea fishes of a kind.
_Jour. Franklin Inst._, 90-11:
That, upon the 14th of February, 1870, there fell, at Genoa, Italy, according to Director Boccardo, of the Technical Institute of Genoa, and Prof. Castellani, a yellow substance. But the microscope revealed numerous globules of cobalt blue, also corpuscles of a pearly color that resembled starch. See _Nature_, 2-166.
_Comptes Rendus_, 56-972: